Monday, April 25, 2005

This excerpt from a new book on the Lord
of the Rings trilogy explores the issue of sophistication and the
happy ending, or the ways fantasy films speak to and for the inner child. A
Metaphilm online exclusive.

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Other Recent Long Stuff

Books to Phlog

Understanding Jacques Ellul, by Greenman, Schuchardt, and Toly, will be of special interest to Metaphilm readers as Jacques Ellul understood cinema as one of the chief tools of propaganda used by the state to distract the masses from that which matters.

On the other hand, in a piece of original research (with a more aggressive methodology) called the Middletown Media Studies Report from the Center for Media Design at Ball State University, the claim is that folks are consuming 11.7 hours of mass media (of one kind or another) every 24 hours, 5.3 hours of which is a daily TV tube drip feed. Even under convergent multi-tasking conditions, TV consumption still outstrips any other single medium for time spent, and nearly triples the time spent on the second nearest contender, radio. Hello future filmmakers: if you want to have more time in your day—to be, say, a producer rather than merely a consumer of electronic culture—then here’s the obvious message of the medium: turn off your TV. Then again, if you want to get smarter in the sense that Steven Johnson is talking about, then please pass the chips, and don’t touch that dial.

There are subtleties and complexities not fully addressed by either report (but acknowledgment of the complexity is offered by the Ball State report), such as those who watch TV on their web browsers, or those who keep the TV on as background noise or as a “radio with images” that they don’t actually watch, but merely listen to while knocking about the house. For these viewers, one suspects Johnson’s story doesn’t hold up, and yet this increasing habit may at least partially explain why TV viewing is officially rising, not decreasing, under multimedia conditions. Still less touched upon was how much of “TV viewing” was in fact film viewing via the medium of TV (with or without cable, VCR or DVD).

But in case you’re curious, reading this blog entry (and linking over to the various sites referenced here) only requires a fraction of the little over an hour a day you spend online—which is time well spent, isn’t it?

Good thing. There’s a new child in our home and I’m coming to conclusions that probably occurred to our publisher a decade or two ago. Some philosophies are simply not viable in the presence of a three-month-old baby. And as my wife just said, “despair is self-indulgent.”

Bresson’s Product Placement

Watching Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket this week, I couldn’t help but wonder if the scene in the subway in which we see Michel in front and to the right of a seltzer water billboard that says “L’egalite de Perrier” was a conscious choice or not on the director’s part. If so, it struck me as either the first use of product placement in film, or else, more likely, a nice and (given the way it was shot) subtle means of using “found” media messages as a contrast to the protagonist’s views—in the film, Michel makes a somewhat tenuous argument justifying his pickpocketing by claiming he is part of the elite of society who should go unpunished since they are ostensibly doing French culture a favor by redistributing the wealth. Is this scene the first time in cinema history that the rhetoric of a film’s content is contrasted with the rhetoric of the dominant culture into which the film’s narrative arrives? If Bresson is as all that as many claim him to be, then having the “editorial” of the film world contrast with the “advertising” of the viewer’s world produces an interesting paradox: the viewer comes away confirmed in their intuition that only through film can we really see and then question the dominant cultural ideology, at the same time feeling perplexed, since escaping to the movies is already a fundamental part of the dominant cultural ideology before we enter the theater. I have a vague recollection of a similar moment where a character’s actions/motivations are contrasted on screen by an advertisement they pass by, in an early Buster Keaton comedy (which would be a much earlier example), but can’t place the film or scene. Anyone?

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Incredibles and the Right

Speaking of The Incredibles, we got—and are enjoying—the double DVD pictured in our current philm item and lo and behold! The conservatives turn out to have been right, more or less, in their take on the hit film. The DVD extras interview with director Brad Bird and particularly the alternative opening sequence do confirm that The Incredibles has a considered pro-family viewpoint, and Bird was trying to make a quietly radical film.

In the alternative opening, the Parrs are at a neighborhood barbecue and a career-type woman is disdainful of Helen Parr’s staying home with baby Violet. The lines given to Helen, says Bird, are inspired directly by the experience of Bird’s own wife, who postponed her career for a time to raise their first child. Helen offers a passionate defense of motherhood in its more traditional expression.

Of course, Bird is not a culture warrior (thank goodness), and so even for these deleted scenes the “war” metaphor is inappropriate. He comes across in the DVD interviews as a cheerful film enthusiast with a healthy amount of common sense (one wishes Hollywood had more of this type). Given the acrimony in the air these days, his strategy for setting out a story where one’s views will speak out for themselves calmly and naturally is most welcome.